The personal view on the IT world of Johan Louwers, specially focusing on Oracle technology, Linux and UNIX technology, programming languages and all kinds of nice and cool things happening in the IT world.

Tuesday, December 27, 2011

Memcached explaind by James Phillips

A very interesting video with James Phillips who is the Chief Strategy Officer and cofounder from NorthScale. Northscale provides elastic data infrastructure software and is closely tied with the guys from couchbase and are the developed on the memcached project.

Membase was developed by several leaders of the memcached project, who had founded a company, NorthScale, expressly to meet the need for an key-value database that enjoyed all the simplicity, speed, and scalability of memcached, but also provided the storage, persistence and querying capabilities of a database. The original membase source code was contributed by NorthScale, and project co-sponsors Zynga and NHN to a new project on membase.org in June 2010.

In computing, memcached is a general-purpose distributed memory caching system that was originally developed by Danga Interactive for LiveJournal, but is now used by many other sites. It is often used to speed up dynamic database-driven websites by caching data and objects in RAM to reduce the number of times an external data source (such as a database or API) must be read. Memcached runs on Unix, Linux, Windows and MacOSX and is distributed under a permissive free software license.
Memcached's APIs provide a giant hash table distributed across multiple machines. When the table is full, subsequent inserts cause older data to be purged in least recently used (LRU) order. Applications using Memcached typically layer requests and additions into RAM before falling back on a slower backing store, such as a database.

The system is used by sites including YouTube, Reddit, Zynga, Facebook, Orange, and Twitter. Heroku (now part of Salesforce) offers a Couchbase-managed memcached add-on service as part of their platform as a service. Google App Engine, AppScale and Amazon Web Services also offer a memcached service through an API. Memcached is also supported by some popular CMSs such as Drupal, Joomla, and WordPress.

implementing membase and the memcached API's can help you speed up your website enormously. Investigating the options in this field when you are building a high traffic website is very important and can mean the difference between success or failure in my opinion. memcache can be seen as one of the future building blocks and should be taken serious when you develop large scale web applications.